


the word

by eggstasy



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Ableism, Ableist Language, Gen, Introspection, there are some uses of the 'r' slur be warned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-24
Updated: 2016-10-24
Packaged: 2018-08-24 11:54:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8371378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eggstasy/pseuds/eggstasy
Summary: By the time Michael is ten, the word, as it is called, has been banned from their house.





	

Michael J. Caboose is five years old the first time someone calls him retarded.

Two big sisters get angry for him but he doesn’t get it.  They were just walking home from the store, and he was trying to pick up a rock each time his foot got in the way.  So he would chase it, and then his foot would kick it when he leaned down to grab it.  So he would chase it again, and it was a fun game so he didn’t ask anyone else to pick up the rock for him.

Someone didn’t like his game and called him a word he didn’t know, but he knew that it made his sisters very angry on his behalf and they walked back holding his hands, their own knuckles red and cut and bruised, their faces dirty and angry and wet.  “You don’t listen to people like that,” Madeline tells him as she leans down to tie his shoes.  She’s older than him by almost ten years, which is a lot of years, and she is almost the oldest so she takes care of a lot of them.  “You don’t listen to people who call you names or try to ruin your fun.”

“If you’re not hurting anybody, you do anything you like _however_ you like,” Victoria adds at his side.  Her other hand is in his hair and it feels nice, but he can’t tell why they’re so upset.

“What does that mean?” he asks, and he holds Victoria’s hand still and takes Madeline’s when she stands, because they both seem to need it more than he does.  Maybe their hands hurt after hitting that other person so many times.  “What’s retarded?”

Madeline sniffs again so Victoria answers.  “It means they think you’re slow.”

Well, that’s true.  He’s much slower than his sisters, with their long legs and fast brains.  He didn’t think there was anything wrong with being slow though, but maybe some people are just more impatient than others.

 

* * *

 

By the time Michael is ten, The Word, as it is called, has been banned from their house.  His sisters outnumber his mother and grandmother by many, and he doesn’t get along with all of them but nobody hates each other.  Hating is for people who have the luxury of having other people to escape to.  The moon has bubbles on the surface where families live and it’s hard to travel between them if you don’t have a reason, so there are five families you always see and you need to get along with all the people in your bubble.  If you don’t, and times get hard, sometimes you don’t get the things you need, like food or blankets.  People need to learn how to share.

“Michael, go ask the Petersons if they can spare some blankets.”  Michael’s mom would go, he knows, but her belly is big again because Dad visited around his birthday and gave her another baby.  Michael kind of wishes that Dad would stop giving her babies.  Even with the older sisters leaving to go other places, they’re starting to run out of room again.

“Okay,” he says, and goes to look for his shoes.

“Daisy, go with him.  Make sure he doesn’t get lost.”

“I won’t get lost,” Michael mutters, but doesn’t fight it.  Daisy is younger than him and he will need to look after her, like Madeline and Victoria always did for him before they left.  Madeline still sends home letters.  Michael is getting much better at reading them.

Daisy, only six, crouches next to him as he ties his shoes, slowly.  “Hurry up,” she complains.

“Things don’t always have to happen fast,” he tells her wisely, but she only rolls her eyes.  When they start walking he takes her hand, but she shakes him off and plays a hopping game instead.

There’s a boy at the Petersons’ house who Michael doesn’t like.  “Why’re your shoes pink?” he asks, leaning against the door instead of getting his parents like Michael asked him to do.

“Because they were made pink?”  Michael never bothered asking.  His old shoes fell apart so his mother gave him these.  These ones aren’t falling apart.  It seemed pretty simple to him.

“Boys don’t wear pink shoes.  Especially not old and ratty ones like that.”  The boy has a look on his face that reminds Michael of the one that man wore, five years ago, when he said a word Michael has learned not to like. 

“Well.  I’m a boy and I’m wearing them, so…”

“You retarded or something?”

They do not come back with blankets, but Daisy holds his hand with the knuckles red and throbbing, and he thinks it feels a little better when someone holds on like that.  Mom isn’t happy and she yells and cries, “We _needed_ those blankets, Michael,” so he gives her his blanket and tells her that it’s fine, if he gets cold he can just go running, which always warms him up.

 

* * *

 

Fifteen comes upon Michael in a storm of confusion, like fourteen did and like he’s sure sixteen will, too.  He’s getting used to being confused, and getting used to pretending not to be confused, though it seems he’s not very good at it.

Madeline’s letters only come once in a while but Michael keeps them in a box underneath the floorboards, down below where his mattress is laid out.  He reads them when he’s especially confused and things make more sense again.

He’s not the oldest but he’s the biggest, and he’s not that great at school so Michael decides to quit and help his mom and grandma run the house.  He takes his littler sisters to and from school.  He helps them clean and pick up heavy things.  “You’re getting so big,” his mom says, all the time, kind of in an amazed voice like she never thought it would happen.  “You’re almost taller than me now.”

Michael likes being big.  It makes him helpful.  It makes people afraid to call him the word he doesn’t like.  His hands are big and his knuckles are rough but nobody calls him that word anymore.

His dad comes home.

“Why’re you running him around like a housemaid, Dora?”  Michael’s dad is loud.  He doesn’t hit with his hands, but he hits with his words, a lot of the time.  Michael shuffles the smaller sisters into the bedrooms and tells them to play, takes the babies from Mom over to Grandma and together they put them in the crib.  “Look at the size of that big galute!  He should already be working.”

“He’s fifteen, Charlie, fuck off!  I don’t see you here to run this household any other time so don’t tell me how to raise this family if you ain’t sticking around to help do it!”

“What’re you waiting for, him to grow up?  Get smarter?  The boy’s dumb as a box of rocks, if you took half the rocks out!  He’s retarded Dora, he ain’t never-”

Dad doesn’t get to say what Michael will never do because Michael’s mom slaps him and tells him to get out.

Michael never sees Dad again after that.

He’s not that sad about it.

 

* * *

 

It takes seventeen years of living, but finally Michael figures out how to fix the things he breaks.

The first thing he fixes is an old space heater they were going to throw out.  Mom sees it and cries, and reaches up to hug his neck tight.  “Mom I can’t breathe,” he wheezes, but it still takes some time for her to let him go.

“I knew you were good at something,” she sobs, and she sounds so happy for him that he pats her back.  He’s glad to be good at something too, finally.

He doesn’t always fix things right.  The toaster oven has to have a pot leaned against it to stay shut, and his sister’s motorbike will sometimes slip down a gear, but they’re more fixed than they are broken, which is what they were when he first got them.

Daisy is small, just like her name, and she’s awkward and lonely so Michael fixes her a friend he found in the dumpster behind the school.  Daisy turns it on and a small person shows up on the datapad.

“Hello.  I don’t have a name yet.  Would you give me one?”

“Mikey,” she sighs, handing the datapad back.  “It’s just a doll.  It’s not a real AI.”

“Dolls don’t ask people to give them names,” Michael insists, and he shoves the datapad back even though he really wants to take it and make a new friend himself.  He doesn’t have any of those either but Daisy needs it more than he does, he thinks.  She’s not good at anything yet.

“It’s like having an imaginary friend, don’t you understand?  If I carry this around, I’ll get laughed at.”  Daisy leaves the datapad on the floor and doesn’t pick it back up for days, so Michael takes it for her.

When he turns it on, the small person is back. 

“Hello.  I don’t have a name yet.  Would you give me one?”

Michael thinks of the box in the floorboards, of the last letter dated a year ago.  “Do you wanna be Madeline?”

“I’ll take that name if you like it.  Madeline is now registered as this unit’s designation.  What’s your name?”

Michael sits down with the little computer person on his knees, balanced as he reaches for a screwdriver and a door servo he still hasn’t quite figured out.  Mom tells him if they can get the basement door to shut, it’ll be a lot warmer in the winter.  “I’m Michael J. Caboose.”

“It’s good to meet you, Michael J. Caboose.”

Nobody has ever told him that it’s good to meet him.  Michael likes new Madeline already.

 

* * *

 

Mom sells Michael’s only friend when he turns eighteen so he yells at her.

“It was a stupid toy, Michael!  Toys don’t feed your family for put clothes on your goddamn backs!”

Michael is in tears when he tells her that it doesn’t matter, that Maddy was his only friend, the only person ever happy to meet him, and he decides that night that he’s going to leave, like his sister Madeline did.  Mom didn’t sell his best friend for food or clothes money.  Mom came home with cigarettes and beer.

He decides on college, because then he can learn how to fix and build more friends, which is the only thing he’s ever been any good at.  Michael never finished high school but he heard that there were places where you could take a test and get your diploma anyway, and he figures if anybody knows about those, it would be people who are in college.

He wakes up before anybody else, goes down to the college recruitment center and sits down outside until an army person shows up to unlock the door and gives him a funny look.  “We don’t take runaways.”

“I’m not a runaway.  I just like being early.”

The army lady looks at him tiredly and sips her coffee, holding the door open for him to go inside.  When he stands up she looks at him again more carefully, eyes going up and down his whole body.  “You’re a big guy, huh?”

“Yeah.  I get that a lot.”

They sit down at a desk together and the army lady leans on her elbow.  “This is for the UNSC, you know.  We can send you to college.  Do you have a diploma?”

“I didn’t finish high school but I heard you can take a test.”

She writes down some addresses for him.  “Go here and request a GED qualification test.  That’s what you’re looking for.  If you get that, come back here and give me your GED and I can get you enlisted.”  She gives him another look, the look people give him when they’re thinking of a more polite version of the word he hates.  “Are you sure about this, kid?  This is the UNSC.”

“But I’ll go to college?”

She nods.

“Then I wanna go.”

Michael goes to the GED place.  They give him some booklets and testing things and he takes them home.  His mother doesn’t say anything when he comes home with them, and Michael reads and reads instead of doing his chores, for two days, until he can go back to the testing place and take a test.

He just barely passes, but he does.  He forgets everything almost immediately after, but they give him a piece of paper with his name and G-E-D on it, so he doesn’t care.

When he brings the army person his GED, she tells him to sign here, and here, welcome to the UNSC, kid.

 

* * *

 

They tell him he has to do basic before he can go to college.  Michael is still eighteen and doesn’t know anything about college or the UNSC, but getting the basics down first sounds pretty smart so he goes where tells him to go, and does what they tell him to do.  He’s bad at remembering but really great at running and climbing and lifting.  Not so great at shooting, but they can work on that, they said.

After all the training they put him right back on the moon, even though he’s in a different bubble than from his home.  That’s fine with him.  He’s still mad at Mom, a little bit.  She sent him letters and he sent some back, and he sent one to Daisy and another to Teresa, but they’re all the normal stuff.  Like he’s not doing what Madeline did and leaving without ever turning back.

Lots of people complain about the army, about having to share rooms and things with people and taking short showers, but it’s all the same to Michael.  Even if he’s a little too big for the bunk they give him, he has his own chest for his things and nobody else is allowed into it.  Most people leave other people’s things alone.  It’s sacred space.

“Hey Caboose,” yells one of his squadmates, a guy named Parsens that he’s not very fond of but doesn’t have any particular reason to hate yet.  They all use last names around here so Michael doesn’t protest it, but he doesn’t like the way some of his squadmates say ‘Caboose.’  Like it’s a noun and not a person’s name.  “You’ve seen all that framework they’re putting up lately?  They’re gonna expand the bubble.”

Michael looks up at the framework.  He doesn’t know what it’s for, but that could be it.  It _is_ very crowded.

Two months later and there’s more framework, and more of that clear plating they use to make bubbles between the pieces.  It looks finished.  It looks like home.

“Cool, right?”  Parsens digs an elbow into Michael’s back.  “They just sent out a memo.  It’s already airtight, we could walk right out that airlock.”

He means the airlock with the big DO NOT USE sign in front of it.  The one that won’t open.

“Looks like it’s still broken,” Parsens sighs.  “I sure wish somebody would fix it.”

Michael walks right over and pulls off the maintenance panel.  “I can fix it,” he says, and starts pulling out wires.  Parsens laughs and says something over his shoulder that Michael doesn’t hear because he’s concentrating.  He knows most of his squadmates think of the word he doesn’t like when they talk to him, but they don’t know that he’s good with machines.  There aren’t a lot of opportunities to fix machines when all you do is walk and watch and watch and walk all day.

 His squadmates are still laughing when he says, “Got it!” and the airlock door snaps open.

 

* * *

 

Michael is not yet twenty when he gets transferred. 

“What the hell were you doing?!” screamed the LT into his face when he found out.  “Half your squad could’ve died!  What the fuck don’t you understand about DO NOT USE, you moron?!”

“Parsens said we could breathe,” Michael stammered.

The LT didn’t want excuses, and when it gets escalated, the captain doesn’t want them either.  Michael doesn’t get to sit; he stands in an office, at attention, as his captain stands in front of him and tells him exactly what’s going to happen.

“You don’t belong here,” the captain says.

Michael swallows.

“I’m sending you to another outpost.  No airlocks.  Nothing for you to screw up.  It’s routine patrol, so I’m told.  You’ll be conscripted into a specialized army that’ll be able to handle your…needs.”

Needs.  Michael doesn’t like having needs that are different from most people’s needs.  All he wants to need is food and water, and for people to not tell him lies about airlocks.  “My family is on the moon,” he says, though he hasn’t visited them once.

His captain looks at him and says, “Cry me a river.”

Michael is too afraid to ask about college, and how he’ll go if he’s not anywhere with any schools.

 

* * *

 

Michael turns twenty on the ship to Blood Gulch Outpost Alpha.

 

* * *

 

Church is a mean person.  Michael’s not confused about that.  Church is a very mean person but he is mean to absolutely everybody, and more importantly, he never uses the word Michael hates.  He uses other ones like it; stupid, moron, idiot, but he calls Tucker those words too, and he calls the enemy Reds across the canyon those words too, and sometimes he calls their guns or their suits or even himself those words.  Michael is sad the first few times he hears those words at himself, until he realizes Church just thinks everybody is a stupid idiot moron.  Then he feels better.  Church thinks he’s like everybody else.

Tucker does not.  Tucker thinks he’s _particularly_ stupid.  Tucker gives him looks that remind him of that word he hates and takes Church’s attention away from him.  Tucker, Michael decides quietly to himself, is a dick.

When Michael being stupid gets Church killed, he feels like dying.  When Church comes back as a ghost, he figures everything will be okay again so long as he makes it up to him.

When things happen inside his head that he doesn’t understand, Michael forgets why he hates some words, forgets Daisy’s gaptooth and the freckles on her face, forgets how to talk faster and think faster and look faster.  He can still run fast.  He can still pick things up.

Things are too slow.  Much slower than before.

Michael wonders if he really is that word, now.

 

* * *

 

Michael doesn’t remember how old he is anymore, and many, many things happen.

Tex shows up and becomes a girl.  Michael is scared of her but likes her.  She’s like Church.  She’s mean to everybody evenly.

The Reds become their friends.  Or their enemies.  Their frenemies.  It flipflops so much that Michael can’t really keep track, so he just decides that they must be both and only points his gun if someone points their gun first.

They go to the future, and then the past, and then the present but the present is in the future.  They meet an alien.  Tucker has a baby, which is of no surprise to anybody but Church.  Which is silly, if anybody here would end up with a baby, it would be Tucker.  Tex blows up and Church is sad.

They all split up.

Michael goes to another team and realizes, a little late, when they tie him up and put him in the basement, that his new assignment was special somehow.  This one is just like his old assignment on the moon, with lying people who point guns very quickly and get guns pointed back, who are meaner than the mean people he already knows, who look at him and say the word he used to hate.

Gruf and Simon visit him sometimes.

Michael misses Church so much that his heart hurts.

 

* * *

 

Agent Washington has a heart full of hurts.

Michael can relate.

 

* * *

 

Michael is older now.  Not too old, he doesn’t think, but older than most of the new friends he’s made.  They look at him like he’s special; not special in the bad way, but special in the good way.  Smith is very nice and friendly, and listens to what he says and hears what he means, sometimes.  One time a person calls Michael the word that used to make him angry that now just makes him sad, and Smith gets very angry instead and punches that guy and then his knuckles are red and bruised.

Michael talks to him for a long time after that.  Smith salutes him, but Michael gives him a hug.  Salutes are nice, but not like hugs are.  And Smith hugs him back super hard, so Michael thinks he probably got too many salutes and not enough hugs.

There is lots of fighting, but there’s always lots of fighting.  Tucker is upset all the time and Michael doesn’t really like Tucker, but he does love him so he tries his best to make him stop being upset.  Finding Agent Washington and their other friends helps.  Michael’s glad they found them before he forgot.

Things are hard.  Everybody is sad a lot of the time.

Michael knows what it’s like to be sad.  He knows what it’s like to try and stop yourself from being sad.  He talks with the scary doctor lady and she is very honest with him, and he stops being scared of her.

When he asks her if he’s retarded, he memorizes what she says because it’s very, very important:

“You have brain damage, which _does_ inhibit a lot of your cognitive functions-”

He doesn’t remember some longer words so he asks her to please keep them short.

“Right.  Medically speaking, with your brain?  No.”

He doesn’t understand.  He tells her.

“If we’re going by the old, outdated, _non-offensive_ definition of that word, if there even is one, it means being behind in your development for your age.  You aren’t behind in anything, Captain.  You’re very mature for your age.  Your brain has a great deal of scar tissue which may impair your- which may make it difficult to think, and to react and do things.  That doesn’t mean _you_ are slow.  Do you understand?”

It takes Michael some time to understand.  He’s not sure he believes her when she says he isn’t slow.

“It’s a different kind of speed.  Being able to think quickly, speak quickly, is a skill that some people have.  I have that skill!  I’ve always been that way since I was born.  With our society the way it is, my skill of intellectual speed is considered very highly valued.  You also have an extremely valuable skill, one that's very often dismissed by people with my skill out of ignorance.   Your skill is emotional fortitude.”

Emotional fortitude.  Michael likes the sound of that.  He tells her.

“I thought you might.  It means that even if things happen not to your liking, you’re still able to carry on as you usually do.  Consistency of character is incredibly useful.  That doesn’t mean you’re incapable of change; it means you understand yourself, and can adapt to any situation accordingly.  It’s a good quality to have, especially in wartime situations.”

When Michael tells Agent Washington what Doctor Emily said to him, Agent Washington puts his arm around him very, very awkwardly and calls him ‘buddy’ a lot.  Michael loves Agent Washington so much.  Michael doesn’t think Agent Washington has too much emotional fortitude, but he makes up for it by trying so very, very hard.

 

* * *

 

Michael doesn’t know how old he is.

He no longer has any words he hates.

Instead, he has words he hates not hearing.  Michael hates not hearing ‘you are my friend,’ so he says it as often as possible to remind the people around him to say it.  He hates not hearing ‘I love you very much,’ so he says that as often as he can too.  He says it to people he thinks don’t get to hear it a lot, like Agent Carolina, and all of the new younger friends who wear his color.

He doesn’t like it when people don’t say ‘goodbye,’ but he understands why some other people might hate that word.  It hurts to hear it, sometimes.

But 'goodbye' is a good hurt, because that means at some point, you must have heard 'hello.'

**Author's Note:**

> i love my large son
> 
> he is a good


End file.
